Tears formed in Kurt Wolff’s eyes as he witnessed what was in fact the official recognition of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
From then on it was the only unit to which Kurt Wolff ever wanted to belong.
* * *
The Leibstandarte first came into being on March 17th, 1933 as a personal bodyguard to Hitler before his power was absolute, when the brown-shirted SA and the black-shirted SS — derived from Schutzstaffeln, meaning Protection Squads — were competing, and the Communists and Nationalists were still to be reckoned with.
One of the first duties of the Leibstandarte under the command of Sepp Dietrich was to shoot the leaders of the SA rounded up by the SS, now a unified force under the leadership of Himmler, in the summer of 1934. The purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
The SS became an independent unit within the Nazi Party and the cream of them, the Leibstandarte, were honoured with a special oath of allegiance: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer, and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”
When the German Army reoccupied the Rhineland in March, 1936 — Hitler had announced conscription a year earlier — it was spear-headed by the Leibstandarte. Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich was under way; and he had made it clear that the elite of his dream was the ideological SS, and that the kernel of the elite was the Leibstandarte.
At the time of the Rhineland occupation Kurt Wolff was fifteen. And, like the other boys at his school, he was intoxicated with the deeds of these fair-haired heroes, the embodiment of Himmler’s schemes for racial purity, these supermen in their black overcoats and breeches adorned with silver, their boots as bright as mirrors. Had they not cowered the French Army by their very presence in Saarbrucken?
By the time the Leibstandarte, attached to the 2nd Panzer Division of the 16th Corps, had moved into Austria two years later, and the Czech Sudentenland eight months after that, Kurt was approaching call-up age.
But two factors stood in the way of Kurt’s enrolment into the Leibstandarte. In the first place his father, a Major in the German Cavalry in the First World War, wanted him to join the Fourth Cavalry Regiment. To become a ‘real soldier’ instead of an ‘asphalt soldier’ as the Wehrmacht, the conventional armed forces, termed the SS which was now a fully-fledged force of police troops. ‘Asphalt’ because they spent so much time stamping the parade ground.
Kurt loved his father, a prosperous landowner with extensive vineyards in the Main valley of north-east Bavaria, but he could not understand his father’s attitude towards the SS.
“What do you have against them?” he would ask as they sat at dinner in the great yellow-bricked house overlooking the ranks of vines heavy with fat green grapes. “They’re the best soldiers in the world.”
His father, grey-haired, monocled, a widower, would sip a goblet of white wine and reply: “They’re not soldiers, Kurt, they’re policemen.”
“Then why did Hitler send them into the Sudetenland before the soldiers?”
His father never had much of an answer to that. Instead he would evade the issue by describing the SS as the guinea pigs of Himmler’s racial theories. “Aryan manhood! We were good enough to fight in 1914–18 without such experiments. And we nearly won,” he would say waving his cigar at Kurt. “Never forget that. If the Americans hadn’t come in we would have won.”
But the First World War was merely history to Kurt. “But the Führer has stated that one day the SS will fight on the battlefields.”
Wearily his father asked: “What battlefields? Haven’t there been enough battlefields already?”
“The battlefields in The Struggle,” his son replied. Of course there would be battlefields. They had been told so in their history lessons which encompassed the future as much as the past.
Usually his father left it at that and Kurt was relieved, because one of his friends had once repeated a remark made by his father derogatory to Hitler and next day his friend’s father had been arrested by two civilians in long leather coats. Not, of course, that he would sneak on his own father.
Once in their town house in Munich, the seat of the Nazi party, his father said: “I want you to be a soldier, Kurt. But in an army committed to peace.”
“The Führer has said that armies for the preparation of peace do not exist — they exist for triumphant exertion in war,” his son quoted.
And there Kurt Wolff senior left it. But he didn’t abandon his plans for his son to enter the Cavalry. Although the second factor standing between Kurt and the Leibstandarte also affected his father’s ambitions for him.
Kurt was nearly six feet tall. But he was also physically weak and the knowledge embittered him.
His ribs protruded from his chest like the ridges of a washing board, his limbs lacked muscle and his lungs wheezed with asthma. However, he was never set upon because the bullies respected his flinty character. Even at seventeen Kurt Wolff had presence.
But sometimes, standing in front of the mirror in his room adorned with Nazi insignia, and gazing at his thin body, he felt like weeping. Although, of course, he never did.
When the Germans launched their Blitzkreig on Poland in the autumn of 1939, Kurt made a determined effort to improve his physique and his health. He took up weight-lifting, he tried to barrel out his rib-cage with chest-expanders, he devoured enormous steaks and went climbing in the mountains south of his home.
Then secretly he tried to enlist in the Leibstandarte. Because his credentials were impressive, because he was tall enough — minimum height five feet and eleven inches — he got as far as a medical. But the elite of the SS required supermen — a filling in a tooth could disqualify a candidate. And when the doctors saw his scrawny body they shook their heads.
But the ultimate humiliation was rejection by the Cavalry. Not because of his physique but because of his asthma.
The possibility of a desk job within the Wehrmacht remained.
Kurt fled to a health clinic in the Bavarian Alps.
There for six gruelling months, under the supervision of an ageing athlete named Muller, he punished himself.
He hung from wall-bars until it seemed as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets; he ran hundreds of miles along mountain paths; he exercised with the chest-expanders until the springs broke; he swam thirty lengths a day in an ice-cold pool; he boxed with professional pugilists so that his eyes were permanently blacked for the entire six months; he lifted weights so heavy that Muller warned him about the dangers of a hernia; every morning at dawn he stood on the balcony of the health centre and breathed deeply of the frosted mountain air; he climbed ropes and vaulted leather-topped boxes and he performed press-ups until he collapsed on the floor gasping with pain.
He ate steak and fish, cheese and eggs, and fresh vegetables and slept precisely eight hours a night. He walked always with his chest thrust forward and his belly pulled in. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t touch liquor, and he didn’t visit the whores in the nearby town like some of the young men who left the health clinic with new diseases instead of cures.
And he won.
When he returned to war-time Munich — Germany was now at war with Britain and France — he was hardly recognisable as the weakling who had left six months earlier.
The bellows of his chest no longer wheezed: his back was straight, his ribs were finely muscled, his biceps bulged the arms of his old suits, his face was still pale but there was health in his lips and eyes.
He immediately reapplied to join the Leibstandarte, and kept out of his father’s way for a week.
When